Breaking Into James Baldwin’s House

Last May, my wife, Valentine, and I and our friend Shahin took an overnight train from Paris to the Cote d’Azur. The bunks on these couchettes_ _are not comfortable, nor is the trip even a bargain against the high-speed option, which gets you there in less than half the time. But it is worth it for the stretch, early in the morning, when day breaks over Marseille and the train shifts from its southern descent and veers east along the corridor linking Toulon, Saint-Raphaël, and Cannes. Suddenly, the sky fills with pastels that turn to gold and shatter on the sea. Standing in the narrow hallway, hands against the glass, your whole body lets you know that you are in the South. From Nice, the terminus, we took a car twenty minutes inland through nondescript suburban sprawl that opens onto the pristine medieval hilltop village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence. As a belated wedding gift, Shahin had booked a duplex in the Colombe d’Or, an unfussy, family-run hotel perched at the base of the ancient ramparts. Since the nineteen-twenties, the hotel has provided a haven to all manner of guests, many of them artists eager to exchange canvases with the forward-thinking patron for room and board. A short list includes Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Léger, Miró, Calder, Cocteau, and Chagall—all of whom have work hanging casually, almost negligently, in the dining room or built into the spectacular landscape around the hotel’s cloistered terrace and swimming pool. Writers have come, too, and we were on a pilgrimage to retrace the steps of one we hold especially dear. For the last seventeen years of his life, until his death in 1987, James Baldwin, lifelong “transatlantic commuter,” emblem of a free black man, was a regular at the bar of the Colombe d’Or, and called home a sprawling ten-acre property, just down the hill, on the Route de la Colle.

When we’d checked in and had some coffee by the pool, we made the ten-minute trek in the withering midday heat to see Baldwin’s “spread,” as he liked to call it. Over the years, a slew of visitors distinguished enough to rival the Colombe d’Or’s dined and slept there, too, from Miles Davis and Josephine Baker to Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald. But the story I’ve always preferred is that when Baldwin was awarded the Légion d’Honneur, the year before his death, it was his housekeeper, Valérie, and his former landlady, Jeanne Fauré, that he brought with him to meet the President of France. I thought about that as we approached the property, an extremely wide and shallow expanse of overgrown grass, orange trees, cypresses, wild lavender, and palms that gives sweeping views of the walled town above, the sun-drenched valley below, and, in the distance, the Mediterranean’s rippling sheen. The stone barrier wall had been broken a truck’s width and re-sealed with a chain-link fence that begged to be circumvented. I crouched and pulled out the cinderblock that stabilized it; we slipped in easily. I had seen pictures of the lot before, and there was the sense of déjà vu that accompanies walking into any photographic scene. But what remained of the three-hundred-year-old farmhouse and the gatehouse, where Baldwin’s Swiss lover, Lucien Happersberger, lived, had lapsed into a powerful state of disrepair. Birds flew in and out of the second level, and Shahin hoisted himself through a rectangular opening in the side of the first, reporting back that it was trashed and stripped bare.

I don’t know what we’d been expecting to uncover. A short article that Valentine had dug up indicated that the land had recently been sold to a large developer and was to be subdivided into three smaller plots with brand-new villas, but work had been sporadic and then reached a standstill. We had imagined that we would find a way to intervene and gather support for a French-American cultural center in Baldwin’s name. Several weeks earlier, we had written a letter and begun compiling a list of potential allies to seek out. I had already spoken with some knowledgeable friends in Paris, including a novelist who had recently finished a play on the author’s fraught dynamic with his mentor Richard Wright, and a hip-hop artist whose mother knew Baldwin in Istanbul and visited him in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Shahin had even made some bluffing preliminary inquiries from his office at the Ministry of the Economy, which did get the developer’s attention and fuelled our hope, but when we saw the reality of the house’s condition, combined with the obvious value of those panoramic views, it complicated the plan. We picked a few sour oranges and slogged back to the Café de la Place, another of Baldwin’s watering holes, across from the Colombe d’Or. In his honor, we ordered glasses of pastis_ _and gazed out at the square, an Instagram-ready fantasy of the South of France if ever there were one, with tables of tanned families nibbling niçoises salads and an immaculate clay pitch populated by timeless old men, barely moving yet somehow never still, nursing rosé and bickering and patting each other’s backs under the guise of playing boules. Above the trees, the sky had achieved a perfect state of blue. At that moment, I understood why Baldwin never resettled in gloomy Paris (let alone Harlem), and for the first time I also thought I understood why some other blacks had come to if not hate him then certainly look at him askew.

Today, among my generation of black writers and readers, James Baldwin is almost universally adored. In this climate, it’s easy to forget the degree to which the man was disparaged and even savaged by both black and white critics, to both his right and his left, while still alive. There was of course Eldridge Cleaver’s venomous homophobic assault in “Soul on Ice,” only a fraction of which is quotable here: “There is in James Baldwin’s work the most grueling, agonizing, total hatred of the blacks, particularly of himself, and the most shameful, fanatical, fawning, sycophantic love of the whites that one can find in the writings of any black American writer of note in our time.” All but irrelevant today, Cleaver, the Black Panther Party’s minister of information, once the darling of white liberals, easily outflanked Baldwin from the left. Calling him a “jive-ass,” he disavowed his initial admiration for “the cover and camouflage of the perfumed smoke screen of his prose.”

Meanwhile, more serious black intellectuals than Cleaver both publicly and privately picked Baldwin apart. “Within the frame of superficial social insights,” a pivotal scholar of black intellectual history, Harold Cruse, wrote, “Baldwin’s literary skills have seduced many people to accept as profound a message that was, from the first, rather thin, confused and impressionistic.” The brilliant and iconoclastic writer Albert Murray echoed this sentiment, accusing Baldwin of failing as an artist for precisely the same reasons that Baldwin once had denounced Richard Wright. Baldwin’s “difficulties and confusions as a serious writer,” Murray argued, stemmed from his “involvement with oversimplified library and laboratory theories and conjectures about the negative effects of racial oppression.” He accused Baldwin of foregoing “the rich, complex, and ambivalent sensibility of the novelist” and acquiring the “thinness” of the polemicist. “What Baldwin writes about is not really life in Harlem. He writes about the economic and social conditions of Harlem, the material plight of Harlem. But far from writing in terms of a U.S. Negro tradition,” which for Murray was a southern, rural one, “he confuses everything with Jewish tradition and writes about life in a black ghetto!” Ralph Ellison was even more dismissive—and acidly homophobic—writing privately to Murray, “Take a look at their works, I don’t think either is successful, but both are interesting examples of what happens when you go elsewhere looking for what you already had at home. Wright goes to France for existentialism when Mose, or any blues, could tell him things that would make that cock-eyed Sartre’s head swim. As for Baldwin, he doesn’t know the difference between getting religion and going homo.” Perhaps most damningly, even Martin Luther King, Jr., in a conversation secretly recorded by the F.B.I., expressed ambivalence about appearing with the author on television, claiming to be “put off by the poetic exaggeration in Baldwin’s approach to race issues.”

Almost all of this criticism, whether literary or political, explicitly ad hominem or euphemistic, was rooted in an intense and widespread aversion to Baldwin’s sexuality and personal presentation. A May, 1963, Time_ _magazine cover story emphasized that he was a “nervous, slight, almost fragile figure, filled with frets and fears … effeminate in manner.” He was “not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Negro leader.” King, for all his concern about the purpleness of the prose, would almost certainly have been aware that Baldwin was frequently mocked as “Martin Luther Queen” in civil-rights circles. In “All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin,” Douglas Field notes that some of King’s closest advisers openly expressed the view that Baldwin was “better qualified to lead a homo-sexual movement than a civil rights movement.” And though that is terribly unfair, in a sense, they were right, at least in part. For one small example—though it was not a small feat—it is “Giovanni’s Room” that, in the years leading up to the recent debate over and ultimate victory of same-sex marriage, first taught me, a black man who’d never really had to think about the subject before, to comprehend in the clearest human terms the reality and naturalness of one man’s love for another man.

Baldwin himself was both pained by such rejection and resigned to his own precocity, anticipating his ultimate vindication. “Any real artist,” he maintained, “will never be judged in the time of his time; whatever judgment is delivered in the time of his time cannot be trusted.” And it is clear what he thought his own judgment would be. In his last published interview, with Quincy Troupe, conducted as he was dying of cancer in the house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Baldwin spoke of having tried to avoid a certain “estrangement between myself and my generation.” When asked why he thought he’d grown estranged, he replied, “Well, because I was right. That’s a strange way to put it.”

Troupe: “That’s not strange, at least not to me.”

Baldwin: “I was_ _right. I was right about what was happening in the country. What was about to happen to all of us really, one way or the other. And the choices people would have to make. And watching people make them and denying them at the same time. I began to feel more and more homeless….”

Now, nearly three decades after his death—as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., predicted and perhaps provoked in a 1992 essay recounting his own visit to Saint-Paul-de-Vence—James Baldwin is having a glorious moment. In numerous palpable ways, he has come to occupy a more hallowed, almost sacrosanct, position in the imagination of black readers and writers than he ever enjoyed among the audiences of his day—eclipsing in the twenty-first century his closest mentors, competitors, and peers. Some of this is surely the result of our culture’s general, unremitting tendency toward nostalgia for all things. But mostly it has to do with the man himself. Where his cosmopolitan, nonconformist interests and way of life rendered him suspect to many in his later years, he now appears prescient, too enlightened for his time. The same characteristics of the Baldwin brand that so “estranged” him from the concerns of his generation and of black America writ large—his intersectionality before that was a thing—are what make him such an exemplar of the decidedly queer-inflected mood of the Black Lives Matter era now. What was uncharitably deemed shallow about the man and his work—the Richard Avedon portraits, the sweeping rhetorical flights (“precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society”)—makes him a star on social media today. Like a black Joan Didion, or, to a lesser degree, Camus, his iconic image, with or without the shareable quotes stripped of context, comes ready-made for Tumblr and Pinterest in a way that the image of, say, Ellison—a superior novelist and perhaps an even more coldly intelligent, if less stylish, essayist—does not.

But there is no better example of Baldwin’s ultra-contemporary appeal than Ta-Nehisi Coates’s runaway best-seller, “Between the World and Me,” a taut and fervid epistolary memoir about his violent West Baltimore youth, addressed to his teen-age son in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting. When a leftist writer on the race beat surveys our own tumultuous time and seeks a model to channel his rage, he may lift his title from Richard Wright, but he cribs his form and a great deal of his content from Baldwin alone. According to the editor’s note, Coates’s book came about after he had reread “The Fire Next Time”_ _and wondered, “why people don’t write books like that anymore”—a valid question. A partial answer may be that when the title essay of that collection first appeared, in The New Yorker, in 1962, though it shocked and electrified the country—particularly whites—its appeal to a courageous love and disavowal of separatism marked it as weakly assimilationist to some, an assessment that was reinforced by the feeling that Baldwin’s fiction failed to evince any discernible black aesthetic or ethnic politics (ironically, he was also attacked for precisely the opposite thing). But we have come a long way from such self-consciously revolutionary times—as Coates correctly deduced, what has always been the writer’s chic, repackaged and updated, is sufficiently radical now.

During the several days we stayed at the Colombe d’Or, we met with townspeople who had known “Jimmy” and also Jeanne Fauré, the local woman from whom he bought the house and with whom he grew very close. We heard that he had never, in fact, completed the acquisition but had, by the end, stayed on out of friendship. When he died, without paying off the reverse mortgage, the property reverted to members of Fauré’s family who lacked the means or inclination to keep it up and eventually chose to sell. Of course, this was a transaction like any other, the inevitable logic of an overheating real-estate market where no ten-acre lot with seaside views can languish forever. On the other hand, as we spent our days swimming and exploring the village, and our evenings on the terrace, watching the sun redden and then fade away, I could not stop myself from attaching a deep significance to that ruined house in the foothills of the Alps, overlooking a distant sea. The thought that one of the most gifted and munificently alive writers of the twentieth century, the quintessential black American in France, would soon be rid of his only geographical footprint, that his only genuine home—like those of so many nameless black families who never get to pass on a legacy—would now be wiped away, struck me as unbearably sad. And I felt there was something shameful about it all, about such conspicuous neglect in a country overflowing with monuments to its stars—adopted and native-born alike—much as there is something criminal about the fact that, back at home, his writing never won a major award. I kept thinking of his bleak, post-sixties memoir, the first book he’d completed after arriving here. There’s that epigraph from Job from which the title is drawn—“His remembrance shall perish from the earth and He shall have no name in the street.” Had it been self-directed all along?

Valentine and Shahin returned to Paris, and I hung around a few days longer, reading and writing and tiptoeing on the hot pebbles down in Nice. I was killing time to meet a friend who would be passing through the Riviera on his way to Russia. Then a black writer I admire, and have developed a surprisingly gratifying Facebook friendship with, wrote to say that she had seen a photograph I’d posted of Baldwin’s house and was coming over from London to get a better look. Soon, the three of us were back in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, stepping around that half-hearted fence. This time the devastation felt, to me, all the more resolute. Josh and I hung back as Rachel scoured the buildings for openings, eventually prying into the upper level of the gatehouse through what seemed, from my vantage, like sheer force of will. We followed her into the dimly lit interior, but my skepticism that the sloping floor could hold the three of us sent me back down into the garden. Near the main house, where a wing had been razed, I spotted several half-buried but mostly intact pastel saucers and coffee cups, which we liberated from the soil. We each took what we could carry and headed back for sunset at the Café de la Place, and then a last drink at the Colombe d’Or. When night fell, Josh and I got a car back to Nice. Rachel, who would continue on deeper into Vence, sat smoking a cigarette, already working out the details of the essay she will contribute to a Baldwin anthology next year. We said goodnight, and the car took us down the hill, down the Route de la Colle, past what’s left of that dilapidated spread. The legacy is fine, I realized. His monument is manifold, and we carry it inside us. The property, too, will be built back up as the reputation already has been—just geared to the specifications of another time.

Thomas Chatterton Williams, a contributing writer for the Times Magazine, is a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is at work on a book about racial identity.